We all have had That Year. The year we realized, or began to suspect that life’s not fair. Some of us have maybe had that year and then several other similar years to serve as a reminder or to keep us acutely aware of how it doesn’t all work out just because we want it to or ask our parents pretty please or because it never has not worked out for us in the past. Sooner or later, we all face that unfortunate truth.

My oldest son, Logan, just had his very first Life’s Not Fair year.

It wasn’t about not getting his way or dealing with frustration in order to learn patience. No, I’m talking about how life slams the door hard in your face sometimes, even when you don’t deserve it, and leaves you feeling gut wrenched, heartbroken and experiencing an anger like you’ve never felt before. It happens. More than once. Sometimes it gives us character, sometimes it leaves us bitter, and sometimes it makes us better.

But also maybe sometimes, it doesn’t do any of the above things. Maybe it just makes us wiser and wakes us up the next day with a different perspective. That, I think, is Logan.

Actually, the events of the past 9 months really haven’t been fair to any of the members of my family, especially the kids. Somehow, though, it is my 10 year old Logan that I have seen the most affected. I don’t know why, maybe it’s his age, his sensitive nature, or the fact that I’ve done more than my fair share of making it all OK for him as much as possible ever since he came into my life. I always said I’d never be that parent, but I could write a book on all the things I do that I said I’d never do.

I’ll never forget the night we had to tell the boys that their grandmother, Mimi, was going to die from brain cancer. It was one of the worst moments of my life. We’d put it off as long as we could, even though we adults, well schooled in the Life’s Not Fair lesson, learned in early January that there was no hope for her survival. We sat on the sofa in our living room on a bitterly cold Friday evening in February and spelled out the facts. Boys, we’re so sorry, but Mimi is very sick and she is going to die.

 There was nothing I could do to fix that. I couldn’t take the boys to the store as soon as it opened in the morning to buy a new Mimi. I had to just let it be not fair and hope that they would come to accept it and move on, as we adults were preparing to do. It was a helpless feeling I had as I could do nothing but sit on the sofa and hold my sobbing sons on that horrible evening. As I spent those sad moments with my sons, I could sense the desperation in Logan as he turned it over and over in his mind and tried to make it different, and finally settling on the reality of the situation.

The next day, my then 9 year old Logan went with his dad to Mimi’s house and crawled into bed with the woman who had been such a huge part of his life, his greatest champion even in the very earliest parts of his life, the woman who had less than 24 hours left to live.

It was several weeks later when the whole Life’s Not Fair thing reared its ugly head again and Logan watched helplessly as his beloved #1 in the country Kansas Jayhawks got stung by Northern Iowa in the NCAA Basketball Championships. Once again, I could do nothing but try to comfort him and wait for the sobbing to stop, for him to accept something that was not meant to be, no matter who you are or what you’ve done to deserve a better outcome, and then move on.

No matter whether it was losing Mimi to cancer or watching KU lose in the 2nd round of the NCAA tourney, both events were tragic for him in a way that only he can comprehend. As a parent, I can say with the most heartfelt honesty that I would relive any and all of my worst days if I could erase the worst of my children’s. Yet I know that Logan is on his way to a new understanding of the way it goes, and that sometimes it doesn’t go the way he wants it to.

Sometimes, life’s not fair and that’s all there is to it.

Logan and Mimi 2006

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